


Requiescat In Pace

by c3mf



Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Funeral, Gen, Minor Character Death, Mourning, Sadness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-23
Updated: 2013-04-23
Packaged: 2017-12-09 06:21:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/771008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/c3mf/pseuds/c3mf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for  a prompt on the Cabin Pressure fic meme <a href="http://cabinpres-fic.dreamwidth.org/6034.html?thread=9479058#cmt9479058">here</a> asking for: "Gordon dies. How do Arthur and Carolyn react?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Requiescat In Pace

**Author's Note:**

> Haley is from a previous fic [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/389620), but prior knowledge of it isn't crucial to the understanding of this fic. All you need to know is that she's family.

The service is everything Carolyn expects it to be. Gaudy and grandiose and disgustingly fake. So very much in keeping with the man himself. No one offers her their condolences or even dares approach her. They all know why she’s here and they all at least have the decency to keep their tearfully-rehearsed speeches to themselves. After all, why expend the effort, when she’s not the one who has anything to offer?

It doesn’t go beneath her notice when the mourners circle round Gordon’s widow like vultures.

Arthur shifts uneasily next to her, fidgeting with his tie. Gently, she stills his fingers and doesn’t mention the misty redness to his eyes. He’s doing remarkably well keeping himself together and she refuses to be the lynchpin that undoes him. Certainly not in the midst of these bunch of jackals.

“Sorry,” he mumbles. Even so, his hands still twitch when he lowers them to his sides.

Carolyn smooths out his lapels in answer. “You do what you need to,” she tells him. “There’s no need to stay here on my account. Go on.”

Arthur simply stares over her head in the direction of his step-mother. She can read the hesitation in his face, feel it tightening his shoulders.

”Dear heart,” she says, “I’m fine.”

Because she is and it’s exactly what he needs to hear.

With an awkwardly decisive nod, he wanders off across the lawn. As soon as Tanya catches sight of him, she turns from the gaggle of bootlickers hemming her in and makes quite the show of taking his face in her hands. Even from where she’s standing, Carolyn can see the moment his face crumples. When Tanya pulls Arthur into her arms, it’s enough to remind Carolyn that any animosity was Gordon’s doing, and despite her choice in men, Tanya has never been anything but cordial (if only because she doesn’t have the brainpower to be malicious.)

It isn’t until Carolyn’s finds a bench under the shade of a sturdy oak and is well away from everyone that she notices a familiar face skirting the edges of the crowd.

Haley stands out as an interloper amongst the rest, her expression drawn inscrutably blank as she scans the people gathered with a sort of wary detachment. There are no tears, no paltry words ready to spill from her lips--Carolyn can see that from here. Haley is no more here to mourn Gordon than Carolyn is. After all, strangers don’t mourn other strangers. Carolyn knows Haley has never been under the delusion that she was ever anything else to Gordon other than an utterly shameful inconvenience.

When she at last spots Carolyn, the smile she gives her is subdued, the nod polite. She doesn’t cross the lawn to say hello and Carolyn doesn’t expect her to. The sole reason for their attendance is standing at Tanya’s elbow with his head bowed, hiding the trembling of his mouth behind his fist.

She waves Haley off, watches her slip up beside Arthur without a word. She knows Haley is the only one who can pick up the pieces for this. Arthur tries too hard with her, plasters on a smile and carries on because they’ve come to an unspoken understanding that they speak of Gordon only when strictly necessary.

Idiot boy, she thinks. Still protecting her when the bastard is six feet under.

Even through the exasperation, she finds relief in knowing this will be the very last time Gordon ever hurts her son.

~*~

Tanya sees Haley before Arthur does. There’s a silent exchange between them, an acknowledgement of each other’s place in the grand scheme of things. Then Tanya murmurs her goodbyes and drifts away until she’s swallowed up by another group of leeches doing their very best to pretend they’re broken-hearted wretches over Gordon’s death.

“Too soon,” she hears them say. Tanya drinks up all the attention, dutifully playing the role of the suffering widow. “So sorry for your loss.”

Not soon enough, Haley thinks. And certainly not a loss, not when Tanya is the sole executor to Gordon’s estate.

Then again, none of them would be here if she wasn’t. Everything in Gordon’s life was an absolute sham. It seems somehow fitting that his funeral is exactly the same.

Arthur is concentrating so painfully hard on not sniffling that he doesn’t even notice she’s there until she lays a hand on his arm and says, “Hello, you.”

His eyes are red-rimmed and puffy when he stumbles around to look at her, caught somewhere between bewilderment and relief. Before he says a word, she wraps her arms around his shoulders and that’s all it takes. His arms tighten around her back until she thinks she feels her ribs creak, and he buries his face against her neck. She can tell by the way his breath hitches that he is swallowing down his tears, bottling them up and stuffing them back down because years of living under Gordon’s thumb taught him to keep that sort of weakness to himself.

It’s enough to make her wish Gordon dead all over again.

Still, she knows grief far too well, the swift and crushing intensity of it, how it drowns out the world and thought and leaves a desolation that has no name. So she doesn’t tell him it’s all right, doesn’t shush him, or do anything so blatantly hollow. That would be a denial, demeaning the bleakness and making it into something easily overcome. She has never been able to lie to Arthur. She sees no reason to start now.

Arthur crushes her and she holds on just as tightly, as if by simply refusing to let go she can drink up every last drop of his pain.

She would give anything in the world to make that true.

But the world isn’t that kind. So she does the only thing she can, the only thing she knows that will keep the sorrow from choking him and blacking out the kindness in him that makes him the sweetest person she’s ever known.

She stays.

~*~

The darkness behind Arthur’s eyelids is the same darkness as the inside of his head--storm clouds and shouting and an ache that leaves his bones feeling like lead inside his skin. But slowly the darkness runs to ash and the tears clinging to his lashes stop burning so fiercely.

When he finally pulls away, it’s like coming up for air from the bottom of the ocean.

Haley just smiles and curls her hands around his shoulders. He can’t help thinking she’s anchoring him, keeping him from sinking back into the crashing waves he feels behind his ribs and going under so deep he’ll never surface.

“You came,” he says. His voice sounds broken and miles away to his own ears. “I didn’t think you would.”

“Of course I came,” she tells him. “You asked me to.”

The longer he stands, the more the distance and the echoing fades, and for the first time in what feels like days, he stops drifting.

“That’s why?” The rasp to his voice makes the words wispy, like he’s not certain if he should believe them.

“This isn’t exactly an open invitation event, you know?” The smile she gives him is wry and so comfortingly familiar he can’t help but smile back. “No one’s particularly keen on my being here, besides. I’m the bastard who tarnished his wholesome image, so I don’t matter much, remember?”

His smiles fades just as quickly as it came. “No, you’re not,” he tells her, the last of his tears making his voice rougher than he intends. “Stop saying that.”

She only shakes her head and curls her fingers around his hand. “It’s not a disparagement if it’s true,” she says, leaning into his shoulder. “I’m not being self-deprecating, you know that.”

He squeezes her hand, swallows down the beginnings of the storm he can feel creeping up his throat. “That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“No,” she agrees. “But you do have to accept it.”

He sniffs and swipes furiously at his eyes. “You’re not upset. Not even a little.” It isn’t a question.

She shrugs. “He wasn’t my dad.”

When he turns to look at her, she pulls a face.

“All right, _technically,_ ” she says. “But not in the same way he was for you. We were never family. Mourning him would be like...” She trails off, frowning. “Think about when you watch the news, yeah?” she says after a moment, her words precise and carefully sorted. “And you hear that someone’s died, or maybe you see a funeral procession while you’re in the city. They aren’t anyone you know. So, how do you feel?”

He blinks down at her, taken aback, but she’s gazing out across the plots, staring at the crowd still milling around Dad’s grave.

“I...I don’t know,” he says finally. “Sad, I suppose. You’re supposed to feel sad when people die, aren’t you?”

“But do you feel like your heart has been ripped out of your chest or do you just feel sympathy for something you know you should feel sad about?”

“Sympathy,” he replies automatically. “I don’t think my heart would hurt so much if I didn’t know them.”

“So you still feel badly, just not bad enough.”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

She wraps both hands around his and drops her head against his shoulder. “That’s how I feel,” she says. “It’s awful that someone’s died and I feel terrible for everyone that he mattered to but... He was a stranger to me.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that sort of logic--mostly because he knows it’s absolutely true.

“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feel sad,” she says. “He meant something to you.”

He frowns. “But he shouldn’t, should he? He was...” There are sudden pinpricks of heat at the corners of his eyes, tension that rattles down his spine and curls his fingers into fists. The storm rages again behind his ribs, the waves crashing against his sternum and sucking all the air from his lungs. “He was horrible. To Mum. To _you_.”

“That may be, but he wasn’t always. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t feel sad over him on my account, and I know Carolyn feels the same.” After a moment, she takes her hands from his and snakes her arm around his waist. “I’m okay,” she tells him. “ _We’re_ okay. You don’t have to try and protect us anymore.”

The lump in his throat becomes unbearably tight and his chest aches. _Everything_ aches. The storm beating against his bones turns into a hurricane in his blood and the darkness in his head rushes in fill what’s left. Just like that he’s sobbing, so hard it turns his knees to jelly and it hurts to breathe.

Haley pulls him into her arms and doesn’t let go.

He can’t stop himself from clinging to her. He’s being stupid, he knows, shuddering, gasping wreck that he is. But she doesn’t say a word. He can feel her hands on the back of his neck, smoothing down his hair. Somehow that loosens all of the knots making great ruddy snarls of his insides and makes it a little easier to breathe.

After the last bit of sorrow has finally run its course, Arthur slumps against her shoulder, wrung out and trembling. Haley tangles her fingers with his and gives them a reassuring squeeze. Together, they stand in silence and watch until every last one of the mourners has said their final farewells and gone home.

“Arthur,” she says after a long while, and gives him a gentle nudge. “Carolyn’s waiting”

“I know,” he breathes and closes his eyes. “But not yet, though. Please.”

“Of course. As long as you need.”

She rests her cheek against the top of his head and he can feel the brush of her lips against his hair. When she speaks again, her voice is barely a whisper, but he hears her anyway.

“You’re okay,” she says. “Everything will be okay.”

He is shattered, broken into a thousand million puzzle pieces with no edges and tossed into an ocean with no end. Gathering all the pieces and fitting everything back where it should be is impossible. The picture is missing something now and no amount of rearranging will ever get it back to being quite the same as it was.

The ache is distant now, numbed like there’s a space carved out in his chest where his heart should be. He knows there should be doubt somewhere in this vast emptiness, but all that’s left is a tenuous sort of peace, the calm found in the aftermath of a storm. 

And maybe that’s okay. Because maybe the picture isn’t missing something, after all. Maybe he’s just finally learning to see the picture as something new. 

Somehow, he doesn’t think that’s a bad thing.


End file.
